Bad News For Hillary Clinton

Katrina Pierson a spokesperson for the Trump campaign just said GOP front-runner Donald Trump is optimistic about his chances of beating Hillary Clinton.

“Oh, absolutely,” Pierson said in response to a question about Trump’s enthusiasm for facing Clinton in November. “Mainly because Hillary Clinton has never been truly vetted before. Particularly by the media,” she said to MSNBC’s Tamron Hall.

“How many times has Hillary Clinton been asked about the specific role in Benghazi outside of the testimony?” Pierson asked.

Pierson said younger voters need to be informed about Clinton’s past.

“There’s an entire generation of voters out there that know nothing about Hillary Clinton other than what they have heard in the last two to three years,” she said.”

Boom Katrina Pierson barely finished saying that when news reports began to surface that Hillary Clinton may have to finally deal with her e-mail scandal legally. The Hillreports:

“A federal judge on Wednesday opened the door to interviewing Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton as part of a review into her use of a private email server while secretary of State.

Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia laid out the ground rules for interviewing multiple State Department officials about the emails, with an eye toward finishing the depositions in the weeks before the party nominating conventions.

Clinton herself may be forced to answer questions under oath, Sullivan said, though she is not yet being forced to take that step.

“Based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary,” Sullivan said in an order on Wednesday. [READ THE ORDER BELOW] Discovery is the formal name for the evidence-gathering process, which includes depositions.

“If plaintiff believes Mrs. Clinton’s testimony is required, it will request permission from the Court at the appropriate time.”

The order, which came in the course of a lawsuit from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, leaves open the possibility that Clinton will be forced to answer detailed questions on the eve of her formal selection as the Democratic presidential nominee about her creation of the server.

Any deposition would surely roil the presidential race and force her campaign to confront the issue, which has dogged her for a year.

“Her legal team is really going to fight that really hard,” predicted Matthew Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney who has raised questions about Clinton’s email setup.

“You have to take her deposition in this case to fully understand how it was designed and the whys and the what-fors.”

While leaving the door open to Clinton’s eventual deposition, Sullivan on Wednesday ordered at least six current and former State Department employees to answer questions from Judicial Watch, which has filed multiple lawsuits over the Clinton email case.

That list includes longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin, former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, under secretary for management Patrick Kennedy, former executive secretary Stephen Mull and Bryan Pagliano, the IT official believed to be responsible for setting up and maintaining the server.

The judge also ordered the State Department to prepare a formal answer about Clinton’s emails. Donald Reid, a senior security official, may also be asked to answer questions, if Judicial Watch so decides.

That process is scheduled to be wrapped up within eight weeks, putting the deadline in the final week of June.

Judicial Watch brought suit against the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in an effort to bring Abedin’s emails to light. The lawsuit has since evolved into a battleground over Clinton’s use of the private server.

Clinton’s Republican critics have repeatedly accused her of setting up the private server and then deleting roughly half its contents to evade public scrutiny. In the process, her critics say, Clinton may have made government secrets vulnerable to hackers.

The FBI and government inspectors general are conducting separate investigations related to the server, and the prospect that classified information might have been mishandled.

Clinton has said that she has yet to be contacted by the FBI to set up an interview as part of its investigation, despite long speculation that she will be.

But any deposition in the Judicial Watch case could frustrate that process for Clinton’s camp.

“You only want your client to tell their story once if at all,” said Whitaker, the executive director of a separate watchdog group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust. “If you’re going to stake out some ground in a deposition which is under oath, that’s really a dangerous opportunity to lay out a story that you say is true under penalty of perjury and then it might be used against you, ultimately, if you have to take the stand again.”